“”Yet when it comes to coverage of global warming, we are trapped in the logic of a guerrilla insurgency. The climate scientists have to be right 100 percent of the time, or their 0.01 percent error becomes Glaciergate, and they are frauds. By contrast, the deniers only have to be right 0.01 percent of the time for their narrative--See! The global warming story is falling apart!--to be reinforced by the media. It doesn't matter that their alternative theories are based on demonstrably false claims, as they are with all the leading "thinkers" in this movement.

Climategate is the most common term that the media and blogosphere gave to to a controversy that followed the November 2009 release of thousands of illegally-obtained e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Global warming denialists immediately pounced on the story, claiming that much of the data supporting the existence of global warming were fabricated. The media quoted many of the e-mails[2]out of context.[3] (A big scientific project causes people to curse, disagree and sigh. Who knew?)

Trick or treat?

Much of the furor is over the use of the word "trick," such as when Phil Jones of the CRU wrote: "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline." While the denialists see this as some sort of conspiracy,[4] it is really a mathematical way of dealing with a problem (a mathematical "trick") and reflects scientists interacting with each other (the "decline" also refers to tree ring density, not global temperatures).[5][6] The "hide the decline" issue was so cleverly hidden that it was discussed by several authors and glaringly published in IPCC AR4 Chapter 6 onwards.[7] The denialists also call for the release of the data, despite the fact that 95% of them are already available.

Further trickery

While most of the squawking in the denialist camp has been about using "tricks" to "hide the decline," they pulled out some other quality quote mines as well:

"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." -Kevin Trenberth. Trenberth is referring to the fact that his climate models couldn't totally reconcile the overall global warming with surface temperature measurements. He sneakily covered this up by publishing a paper on it in a scientific journal.[8]

Criticism of Patrick Michaels was mined to make it appear as if the scientists were conspiring to have his Ph.D. pulled (though Ben Santer did write in one e-mail that he would be "tempted to beat the crap out of" him). Another quote about "redefining the peer-reviewed literature" regarding Michaels and Ross McKitrick's 2004 paper purporting to demonstrate the "urban heat island effect" is another common mining job. This was a sarcastic comment about keeping that paper out of the IPCC report. The paper in question happened to be published in a third-tier journal and reached its conclusion by mixing up radians and degrees in the statistical analysis.

"No warming since 1995." This was actually not in the e-mails but was a quote mine from a subsequent interview given by Phil Jones in which he said that his calculations were just short of statistical significance for the HadCRUT dataset from the period of 1995-2009. He does, however, note that the long-term warming trend is significant.[9] This is obviously not the same thing as "global warming is a hoax!" This is usually chucked in with "Climategate" quote mines for bonus deceit points.

Content

RealClimate, the leading blog on climate change, describes the content of the e-mails:

“”More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.[10]

Reactions

From Science

In the light of the controversy, the American Meteorological Society reaffirmed its support for the existence of anthropogenic global warming.[11] The editors of Nature did not think that the hacking required a review of papers published in the journal: "It is Nature's policy to investigate such matters if there are substantive reasons for concern, but nothing we have seen so far in the e-mails qualifies."[12] Jones temporarily stepped down as head of the CRU until investigations were finished. By 2011, five separate investigations by the British government and multiple independent ethics committees had been completed. None found any evidence of fraud or manipulation of data. The CRU data was also independently replicated.[13][14] The harshest criticism in any of the investigations claimed that the scientists were slow and occasionally non-compliant in filling Freedom of Information Act requests (mostly in relation to Steve McIntyre's spamming them with FOIA requests) and one lamented that they ideally should have worked more closely with statisticians.[15] What a cover-up!

From the climate change denialists

In an editorial in the Telegraph, Christopher Booker, author of The Real Global Warming Disaster:[16] called climategate "the greatest scientific scandal of our age."[17] Predictably, Glenn Beck lambasted the e-mails.[18]Anthony Watts, among many other deniers, quoted writer George Monbiot saying that some of the climate scientists should resign,[19] but failed to mention that he also said, "But do these revelations justify the sceptics’ claims that this is 'the final nail in the coffin' of global warming theory?(8,9) Not at all. They damage the credibility of three or four scientists. They raise questions about the integrity of one or perhaps two out of several hundred lines of evidence. To bury manmade climate change, a far wider conspiracy would have to be revealed."[20]Sarah Palin wrote a long Facebook post urging Barack Obama to boycott the Copenhagen conference on global warming, because (ironically) "Policy should be based on sound science, not snake oil."[21]

From the intelligent design community

In a bizarre twist, Denyse O'Leary managed to try to link "climategate" to the "conspiracy" of Darwinism, writing "Our reason for watching this brief is rather the extent to which scientists may have collaborated to prevent a full and fair evaluation of the evidence. If they do it with climate change, they might also do it with Darwinism, cancer research, and any number of other areas.".[22] The IDosphere's conspiracy accusations make you wonder what they think of the Wedge Document.[23]

Impact and fallout

Cross-national comparison of news media content reveals that climate skepticism is treated far more seriously in the British and Amerian press than elsewhere.[24]

A number of newspapers issued retractions about insinuations or outright accusations of scientific fraud after investigations cleared the scientists.[25] Naturally, Climategate is still proof of the massive scientific conspiracy among the denialist crowd. Climategate (along with other issues that have been taking a forefront in the media as a more pressing concern, like the ongoing financial crisis), has helped sway public opinion toward denial. A 2010 Gallup poll showed public split about evenly between attributing warming to man-made and natural causes and 10% replied warming was not happening at all, while 36% were unsure.[26] A 2011 Rasmussen poll reported 69% of those surveyed said it was likely that scientists "falsified" data (though the poll's wording has been criticized for being vague).[27]

Climategate opened the floodgates for a number of mini-manufactroversies, especially those mentioned in the leaked e-mails (listed below), and helped resuscitate quite a few points refuted a thousand times.

Climategate 2.0

In November of 2011, hackers released a number of new e-mails held back from the original batch of Climategate e-mails, mixed in with some of the first batch, possibly to boost their numbers.[29] As was to be expected, these were widely quote mined throughout the denialist echo chamber, further "proving" the existence of a vast warmist scientific conspiracy. Many of the comments taken out of context were in reference to an early draft of the 2007 IPCC report, which the denialists neglected to mention.[30][31] However, much of the mainstream media neglected to cover the second release, with it breaking headline status in the United States, but making no appearance in the news, even among right-wing denialist circles, in (for instance) Australia.

↑ Specifically, tree rings are used as a proxy for temperature reconstruction and a well-documented divergence of some tree ring density (specifically, proxies selected from high latitudes) from the recorded temperature and other proxies exists starting around 1960. This is known as "the divergence problem" and is well-documented in the the peer-reviewed literature and IPCC reports. Sounds pretty sneaky, eh? See Skeptical Science's articles Clearing up misconceptions regarding "hide the decline" and tree-ring proxies and the divergence problem for further discussion.